The Spring Between Us

Chapter 60: Nora's Warning

The yard did not go quiet. The yard went loud.

The doctor stood in the middle of it with his bag at his feet and the sick man's wife on his arm and the words radium and children still hanging in the air, and the town came up around him and the packs came up around the town, and there was a sound in that yard like a hundred wolves all starting to speak at once.

Silas came down the last step of the hall.

"Stand back," he said. "The Council will hear this in the hall and not in the yard. The yard is not a court."

"It is a court today," I said. "You made it one when you sat on those steps with a table and a seal and told the packs to come and be judged. So the doctor will say what he has to say here, in front of the town, and you will listen."

Silas looked at me. Then he looked at the yard and the soldiers along the fence and the town with their caps in their hands, and he did a thing I had not seen him do before. He stepped back.

"Very well," he said. "Let the doctor speak."

The doctor spoke. He spoke for a quarter of an hour and he did not raise his voice and he did not call anybody a liar. He said he had been the doctor in the town for forty years and he had never seen a sickness like the one the assay shed men had. He said the men who worked the shed had burns on their hands and their hair came out and their teeth went bad and one of them had died last winter and the death had been written down as pneumonia. He said he had read the company's own shipping papers, the ones the foreman had brought him, and the papers said the tank was pitchblende concentrate and the doctor had written to a colleague in Denver who knew about such things and the colleague had written back and said that pitchblende concentrate did not need a lead lid and did not make a man's hair fall out.

He said the colleague had said one word in his letter. Radium.

When the doctor finished, Silas was standing with his hands folded and his face calm and his eyes going around the yard.

"The Council will investigate the doctor's claim," he said. "The Council will send a healer and an inspector to the assay shed and to the town. In the meantime the tank will be taken into Council custody and the yard will be cleared."

"No," I said.

Silas looked at me.

"The tank stays in this yard," I said, "and it stays in the sight of the town and both packs until the autumn gathering, and then it goes to the Council in the capital on a wagon with the doctor's letter and the foreman's papers and the wife of the sick man sitting on the seat beside it. And if you try to take it into Council custody, I will put twenty warriors on it and you can explain to the autumn gathering why a Council envoy needed a hundred soldiers to take a lead tank away from a town that has been drinking its water."

The yard made a sound that was not a cheer and was not a threat. It was the sound of a hundred wolves agreeing with a thing.

Silas looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "The Council will hear this at the autumn gathering. Until then the tank stays." He put his hat on. "The hearing on the matter of the seat and the bond will resume at sundown. The yard will be cleared and the hall will be opened and the packs will come in and the Council will rule."

He went up the steps and into the hall. The clerk went after him. The healer went after the clerk. The soldiers along the fence stayed where they were.

The yard began to clear.

Nora found me by the cart with the tank on it. She had her white hair down her back and her dark brown eyes were bright and her hand was on the chain around her neck, and she took my arm and drew me away from the cart and the packs and the town.

"Derya," she said. "There is a thing I have been meaning to tell you since the spring house and I have not told you because I was afraid of what it would do to you."

"Tell me now."

"The Council man. Silas." Nora's hand tightened on my arm. "You said his name in the hall and I knew it and I did not say anything. I have heard that name before. I heard it when I was a girl, in my mother's kitchen, when the old women came to sit with her and talk about the first pair. They said a name and they said it quietly, the way you say a thing you are afraid of."

"What name?"

"Silas's father was named Silas too. He was a Council clerk in those days and he was the man who came to this canyon after the first pair died and took the ring off the Kızıltaş Alpha's hand before they buried him. And my mother told me that the clerk had a son and that the son was being raised in the Council hall and that the son would come back to this canyon one day and finish what his father started."

The yard was going quiet around us. The town was moving toward the gate. The packs were moving toward the hall.

"Finish what?" I said.

"The first pair are dead and the second pair are dead and the rings are hidden and the pact is buried and the Council has had the water for forty years." Nora looked at me. "That is what his father started. And it is not finished, Derya. The pair is standing in this yard with the marks on their arms and the rings on their hands and the pact in their jacket, and the spring is running, and the town knows, and the packs know. So he will not finish it with a paper. He will finish it tonight, in that hall, with a rope or a knife or a soldier, and he will do it before the autumn gathering can hear a word of it."

I stood in the yard with the tank on the cart and the doctor's bag on the ground and the whole canyon going past me.

"Nora," I said. "Where is the tank going tonight?"

"It stays in this yard. You said so."

"It stays in this yard and the yard is full of wolves and the hall is full of soldiers." I looked at the hall. "And at sundown the packs go into that hall and the town goes home and the tank sits in an empty yard with two warriors on it."

Hank came up beside me. "What are you thinking?"

"I am thinking that Silas has lost the water and the ore and the town and the packs and the vote. And a wolf who has lost everything has one thing left and it is not a paper." I turned to Hank. "Get Sten. Get Berik. Get Cal. I want a guard on the tank tonight and I want a guard on the hall and I want a guard on the rogue and I want every wolf in both packs to sleep in this yard with their boots on."

Hank looked at me. "You think he will come tonight."

"I think he will come tonight," I said. "And I think he will not come for the tank. I think he will come for the two rings and the pact and the pair, because his father did not finish it and he is not going to let his father's work be finished by a girl with a book."

The sun was going down behind the western rim. The hall doors opened and the clerk came out and struck the table three times with his gavel and called the hall to order.

And out in the yard, by the gate, a soldier put his hand on his belt and turned and walked toward the tank.